At short notice, I’ve taken on hosting the next Four Stone Hearth blog carnival (about anthropology in the widest sense, including archaeology). It’s supposed to come on-line on Wednesday. The carnival’s home page currently doesn’t reflect the change in scheduling, so you’ll simply have to believe me. There is one small problem. I haven’t received…

A new peer-reviewed intercontinental multidisciplinary journal has just been announced: Journal of the North Atlantic (JONA). Apart from my discipline, JONA will also cover paleo-environmental reconstruction and modelling, historical ecology, anthropology, ecology of organisms important to humans, human/environment/climate interactions, climate history, ethnography, ethnohistory, historical analyses, discussions of cultural heritage, and place-name studies. Its offices are…

The spring issue of Antiquity, a journal for which I am proud to act as a correspondent, has come on-line and is being distributed on paper as well. It has a lot to offer those interested in Northern European archaeology: papers on the construction date of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, England; on the late-1st Millennium…

Somebody once said to me, “You archaeologists don’t really know anything, do you? I mean, it’s just guesses, right?”. Well, sometimes I do despair about archaeology as a science. Can we actually know anything about what life was like for people in the deep past? Are we doing science at all or just deluding ourselves?…

I sometimes run appreciations of little-known blogs here. By no stretch of the word can Pharyngula be called little-read: it’s one of the top-few-hundred blogs on the entire net. But today is P.Z. Myers’s 50th birthday, and that’s cause for rejoicing! Dear Reader, let’s say you happen not to know of PZ and Pharyngula. Then…

I just realised that the lyrics of this traditional Swedish children’s song read just like the recounting of a hallucinogen experience or a psychotic episode. Imagine a goggle-eyed grizzled old hippie buttonholing you at a vegetarian restaurant and forcing you, giggling, to listen to the story of his life-changing episode back in ’68.

The stats for returning readers have taken a healthy jump from about 35 daily in November through January to about 45 daily in recent weeks. I like that a lot! Dear Returning Reader, please take the time to comment on this post, say something about yourself and tell me what kind of blog entries you’d…